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Any (nuclear) enrichment experts here?

  • 31-01-2012 8:59pm
    #1
    Jonny7
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,696 ✭✭✭


    A top scientist recently made the claim that enriching Uranium up to 19+% is 90% of the effort required to reach weapons grade enrichment

    Would you agree with this statement? if not, what is your own estimation..

    I guess there could be two definitions for "effort" here.

    The total effort (e.g. everything, the research, the infrastructure, time, etc)

    or

    the relative effort e.g. the physical time it takes to go from natural uranium to reactor grade (3-5%) to research stage (around 20%) and onto weapons grade (90+%)


Comments

  • #2
    krd
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 3,455 ✭✭✭krd


    I would imagine. Once you've got your centrifuges up and running, it's just a case of running the Uranium through them again and again, until it's highly enriched.

    I think there's a myth built up around how scientifically and technologically advanced you need to be, to be able to enrich uranium.

    The Russians were enriching uranium in the 40s. I can't remember the guys name - but they kidnapped one of the German nuclear engineers just after the end of the second world war, and forced him to design and build them centrifuges. There's an interview and documentary on him somewhere on the BBC radio web archive. There's a beautiful simplicity to the gas centrifuges - they pass the uranium 238 back, and the uranium 235 forward in a cascade. And there's so much equipment you can buy off the shelf today, that you'd never have been able to get your hands on in the 40s, it's probably easier than ever to enrich uranium.

    The trickiest part of the enrichment process the Iranians have had to come up with, was to be able to build a bunker/manufacturing facility so deep that it's impossible to bomb.

    I'm not sure about how uranium is mined. I read once that they had to process 100,000 tonnes of uranium rich soil, to get a gram of uranium (I don't know if that's a gram of enriched - or if it's natural uranium - I'm not sure if that's true, I read it in a newspaper. I don't know if there's easy to mine natural uranium ore. ).

    The Israelis were able to build about 200 nuclear warheads by the end of the 80s.


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